A Mirage Injures Its Driver 6x More Often Than an F-450
Crash ratings tell you how a car protects its own occupants in a standardised test. Insurance claim data tells you what actually happens on the road, to everybody involved — and those are two very different questions.
Houston Asks $10,761. El Paso Asks $14,948. Same State.
Everyone assumes the big city is the expensive market and the drive is worth it. Inside three large states the biggest metro is often the cheapest, and the gaps that do exist come from what is parked there rather than local pricing.
Five Years of Fuel Costs More Than the Explorer Itself
On a ten-year-old car the purchase price is the smaller number. Fuel is the bigger one, and because it arrives forty dollars at a time nobody adds it up before buying.
Pontiac Died in 2010. It Still Sells 42% Below a Chevrolet.
A dead badge on a car that shares its engine, gearbox and platform with a living one is the cleanest natural experiment the used market offers. The market charges a lot less for it, and the parts situation is nothing like as bad as the price implies.
Tyre Complaints Carry 15 Deaths per 1,000. Nothing Else Comes Close.
Complaint counts measure how often something annoys people. Weighted by outcome instead, the list reorders sharply — and the components at the top are not the ones that generate the most reports.
Sixteen Cities Hold Half the Used Market. 190 Share the Rest.
Every piece of car-buying advice assumes you can compare listings. In most of the country you cannot — there are not enough of them, and a thin market changes what a fair price even means.
A Tesla Costs More to Repair Than a BMW. A Fiat Costs a Third.
The cost of putting a car back together after a crash varies by a factor of five between badges, and the ordering has surprises in it. One mass-market brand sits above every German luxury marque.
Michigan Lots Are 74% Domestic. Hawaii Is 51% Japanese.
Where a car was designed still decides what sells, three decades after that stopped being an argument about quality. The map is sharp enough that you can guess the state from the brand mix alone.
Arizona Sells 38% White Cars. Wisconsin Sells 20%.
The colour split between states is almost twice as wide as anything you would guess, and it lines up with latitude. The price gap between colours looks just as dramatic until you control for how old the cars are.
Fixing Your Own Car Got 26% Dearer. Fixing Theirs Didn't.
Two insurance indexes track the cost of the same accidents from opposite ends. One has climbed steadily for two decades and the other has not moved at all, and the difference is sitting in your front bumper.
The Honda S2000 Gets Stolen Twice as Often as It Gets Crashed
Insurance splits your premium into two very different bets. One is about how you drive; the other is about who wants your car when you are not in it. Comparing them exposes which vehicles are targets.
9.5% of the Market Is Under $3,000. Here Is What You Get.
The bottom of the market is bigger than most buyers assume and far less random than it looks. The cars down there are strikingly consistent — same models, same age, same mileage — which tells you what actually survives to get there.